Tuesday Reads: A Mixed Bag of News

Good Afternoon!!

I have a mixed bag of articles for you today. There doesn’t seem to be a great overarching story in the news, although there is quite a bit happening.

Right now the Supreme Court is hearing challenges to President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.

The New York Times has a live blog if you’re interested in following the arguments: Live Updates: Supreme Court Hears Challenges to Student Loan Forgiveness.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments Tuesday over the legality of one of the most ambitious and expensive executive actions in the nation’s history: the Biden administration’s plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in student debt because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The justices began hearing arguments on Tuesday morning in two cases. Each will receive at least one hour of arguments but is expected to run well over that. The court does not allow cameras, but audio of the arguments is being streamed live.

• Both cases grapple with two questions. One is whether the challengers have legal standing to bring their lawsuits. The other is whether the program exceeds the authority that Congress granted to the Education Department and whether it followed legally required procedures in devising the plan. Read about how arguments typically unfold.

• The Trump administration initially paused student loan repayments in March 2020 because of the pandemic. The Biden administration kept the pause until August 2022, then decided to forgive $10,000 in debt for individuals earning less than $125,000 per year, or $250,000 per household, and $20,000 for those who received Pell grants for low-income families. The court challenge has left millions of borrowers in limbo.

• A central point of the case is a 2003 law, the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, which gives the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” to protect borrowers affected by a war or “national emergency.”

• Lawyers for each side will first present their point of view and then answer the justices’ questions in an unstructured format. It is expected to be several months before decisions are announced.

There’s lots of discussion on Twitter too.

There’s quite a bit of news coming out of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News.

The New York Times reports:

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, and that he could have stopped them but didn’t, court documents released on Monday showed.

“They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.”

Mr. Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated as it tries to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.

Proof to that effect would help Dominion clear the high legal bar set by the Supreme Court for defamation cases. To prevail, Dominion must show not only that Fox broadcast false information, but that it did so knowingly. A judge in Delaware state court has scheduled a monthlong trial beginning in April.

The new documents and a similar batch released this month provide a dramatic account from inside the network, depicting a frantic scramble as Fox tried to woo back its large conservative audience after ratings collapsed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s loss. Fox had been the first network to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden on election night — essentially declaring him the next president. When Mr. Trump refused to concede and started attacking Fox as disloyal and dishonest, viewers began to change the channel.

From Politico:

Fox News executive chair Rupert Murdoch admitted in a deposition that some Fox News hosts endorsed President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, potentially undermining the network’s assertion that it was neutrally relaying dubious arguments from Trump and his allies, a court filing released Monday said.

The admission from Murdoch came in a libel suit voting equipment maker that Dominion Voting Systems is pressing against the TV network over its coverage of the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.

However, the ongoing lawsuit is also opening a unique window into Fox’s internal deliberations, particularly in the tense period after Election Day, as the network struggled to hang on to a viewer base heavily invested in Trump’s claims of victory even as senior Fox officials were privately convinced Trump’s claims were bogus and he had lost.

Dominion’s court filing released Monday, a response to Fox’s own recent submission in the case, portrays senior executives at the network as widely in agreement that their network shouldn’t help Trump spread the false narrative. Yet, they repeatedly wrestled with how firmly to disavow it without risking their Trump-friendly audience.

“Some of our commentators were endorsing it,” Murdoch conceded during his sworn deposition, appearing to insist that Fox hosts did not speak for the network. “Yes. They endorsed,” he said.

“It is fair to say you seriously doubted any claim of massive election fraud?” a Dominion lawyer asked the broadcasting mogul.

“Oh, yes,” Murdoch replied.

“And you seriously doubted it from the very beginning?” the attorney asked.

Read more details at Politico.

And more from The Washington Post:

From the article:

More details on this from Raw Story: Fox could be on the hook for campaign finance violations after new court docs drop: former FBI agent.

Among the details revealed is that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch gave election assistance to Donald Trump’s campaign, but it wasn’t just about strategy. Fox got their hands on ads from Joe Biden’s campaign that hadn’t been released publicly. Campaigns submit their ads for commercial buys and typically release the videos publicly after they’re playing on the air. After getting the videos, Fox handed the ads over to the Trump campaign.

Former FBI agent Asha Rangappa questioned whether it could be considered an in-kind donation to a political campaign from a corporation directly to a candidate.

“An in-kind contribution is a non-monetary contribution. Goods or services offered free or at less than the usual charge result in an in-kind contribution,” the Federal Election Commission says on its website. “Similarly, when a person or entity pays for services on the committee’s behalf, the payment is an in-kind contribution. An expenditure made by any person or entity in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate’s campaign is also considered an in-kind contribution to the candidate.”

Ron DeSantis is also getting plenty of attention in the press as he looks more and more like a contender in 2024.

From the NYT:

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida will make his debut appearances in three early presidential primary states in the next several weeks, according to two people briefed on his plans, selling his performance in his own state as he lays the groundwork for an expected presidential campaign.

Mr. DeSantis is tentatively expected to appear in Iowa during the first half of March, making stops in Davenport and Des Moines, according to the people briefed on his schedule who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the plans publicly. Shortly after, he is expected to appear in Nevada, an early primary state, followed a few weeks later by an expected trip to Manchester, New Hampshire….

Hitting the traditional early primary states as he discusses his new book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival,” allows Mr. DeSantis to unofficially test the waters and introduce himself nationally at a time when he’s seen as preparing for a presidential campaign.

Mr. DeSantis is also expected at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Sunday, a place that has often been a launching pad for presidential candidacies. And there are stops expected in a handful of other states, including New York.

A chunk of the Republican electorate, some conservative thinkers and a number of major donors have already pinned their hopes on Mr. DeSantis as the future of the party at a time when they are hoping to move on from former President Donald J. Trump. They have praised his aggressive style and use of the powers of his office, and his willingness to dive into battles over cultural issues that have come to define the modern Republican Party.

From New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg:

Michelle Goldberg: Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary.

In 2017, the government of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban passed a law intended to drive Central European University, a prestigious school founded by a Hungarian refugee, George Soros, out of the country. At the time, this was shocking; as many as 80,000 protesters rallied in Budapest and intellectuals worldwide rushed to declare their solidarity with the demonstrators. “The fate of the university was a test of whether liberalism had the tactical savvy and emotional fortitude to beat back its new ideological foe,” wrote Franklin Foer in The Atlantic.

Liberalism, sadly, did not: The university was forced to move to Vienna, part of Orban’s lamentably successful campaign to dismantle Hungary’s liberal democracy.

That campaign has included ever-greater ideological control over education, most intensely in grade school, but also in colleges and universities. Following a landslide 2018 re-election victory that Orban saw as a “mandate to build a new era,” his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women,” said his chief of staff. In 2021, Orban extended political command over Hungarian universities by putting some schools under the authority of “public trusts” full of regime allies.

Many on the American right admire the way Orban uses the power of the state against cultural liberalism, but few are imitating him as faithfully as the Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. Last week, one of DeSantis’s legislative allies filed House Bill 999, which would, as The Tampa Bay Times reported, turn many of DeSantis’s “wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law.” Even by DeSantis’s standards, it is a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom. Jeremy Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, described it as “almost an apocalyptic bill for higher education,” one that is “orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve seen, either in the recent or the distant past.”

Echoing Orban, House Bill 999 bars Florida’s public colleges and universities from offering gender studies majors or minors, as well as majors or minors in critical race theory or “intersectionality,” or in any subject that “engenders beliefs” in those concepts. The bill prohibits the promotion or support of any campus activities that “espouse diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.” This goes far beyond simply ending D.E.I. programming, and could make many campus speakers, as well as student organizations like Black student unions, verboten.

There’s much more at the link. I hope you’ll read it if you haven’t already. Also see Don Moynihan at his Can We Still Govern Substack: The latest DeSantis attack on education is part of a broader attack on professional competence.

A minor addition to Donald Trump’s growing legal troubles was accidentally revealed by the FEC.

Roger Sollenberger writes:

When the Federal Elections Commission rejected a recent Freedom of Information Act request related to Donald Trump’s “recount” expenses after the 2020 election, the campaign watchdog had a conspicuous reason for turning down the petition: Trump’s political spending after he left the White House is currently the subject of an FEC enforcement matter.

According to agency records obtained by The Daily Beast, the FEC rejected a FOIA request—filed Dec. 20 by a nonpartisan research group that shared the documents on condition of anonymity—because those records may involve an active inquiry.

“To the extent that the records you requested concern an ongoing FEC enforcement matter, we can neither confirm nor deny that any such records exist,” the agency’s FOIA attorney wrote in the letter, which was shared with The Daily Beast.

The request asked the agency for documents and communications related to a major Trump vendor that has received millions in campaign “recount” funds for seemingly unrelated services—including document production for subpoenas from the congressional COVID subcommittee.

Dan Weiner, director of elections and government at the Brennan Center and a former attorney with the FEC, told The Daily Beast that while the response itself isn’t indicative of any stage of inquiry—“readers shouldn’t get excited”—the particular issue is serious.

“The FEC could be indicating one of many different scenarios,” Weiner said, explaining that the agency opens enforcement matters under a range of prompts, from publicly generated complaints to federal referrals to internal decisions. More often than not, enforcement matters resolve in a whimper—a conspicuously glaring pattern when it comes to Trump.

I’m going to end there. I’ll see you in the comment thread.